Jamie Carlson, a veteran firmware engineer and early member of the Tesla Autopilot team, made the headlines last year when he left Tesla to join Apple on ‘Special Projects’ at a time when we were just learning of the scale of the Cupertino company’s ambitions in the auto industry.

Electrek has now learned that Carlson left Apple earlier this month after just over a year at the company. He is staying in the electric vehicle industry by joining NextEV as Senior Director of Advanced Technologies.

Carlson is joining another early member of Tesla’s Autopilot program at NextEV, Kurt Thywissen, former Senior Engineering Manager of UI & Autopilot Software, who is now Senior Director of Human-Machine Interaction at NextEV.

Though unlike Carlson, Thywissen joined NextEV directly from Tesla back in June.

The demand for engineers with experience in building autonomous driving systems is stronger than ever in the Bay Area. Apple, Google, and Tesla all have growing teams of engineers working on their program, while other companies like Baidu, Otto, Mercedes and now NextEV are also actively recruiting.